The Ramanandi Sampradaya is the largest Vaishnava ascetic order of North India and probably the most numerous body of Hindu monks in existence, and it centres on devotion to Rama.
The tradition of Ramananda
The order looks to the devotional teacher Ramananda, traditionally placed in the fourteenth or fifteenth century, who is remembered for preaching devotion to Rama in the vernacular and for admitting disciples without regard to caste, a strain of openness that the tradition preserves in its self-understanding. Its members are ascetics devoted to Rama and Sita, and the order is bound up with the great centres of Rama devotion, above all Ayodhya, held to be the birthplace of Rama, where the Ramanandis are the dominant monastic presence.
Sadhus and akharas
The sampradaya contains a great range of ascetics, from settled scholar-monks to wandering renunciants, and it includes militant regiments, the naga akharas, of armed ascetics who historically guarded pilgrimage sites and revenues and who take a prominent part in the bathing processions of the Kumbh Mela. This spread, from devotional poets to armed nagas, mirrors the pattern found in other large Hindu orders, in which a renunciate ideal coexists with organised bodies that once served practical and even military functions. Its sheer size makes the Ramanandi Sampradaya a major institution of contemporary Hindu monasticism and a central actor in the devotional and pilgrimage life of northern India.